Out West
THE ODYSSEY HAD GAINED STEAM. An adventure travel business was incorporated, following its route, and stories about it appeared in The Houston Post's Sunday magazine. "You reach more readers this way than with a book," my dad said, pleased.
The van travel venture produced, if not a profit, satisfied customers. One wrote me recently, after all these years. "We still say thank you, Carl, for the wonderful trip you planned in '87," said Mrs. Andrew Korinda of Boonton, N.J. "I recently read two books about Texas. The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan and The Borderland by Edwin Shrake. I was so glad you had introduced us to so many of the places in both books."
The first tour, in two vans, filled up immediately thanks to a picture of Longhorns publicizing it in The New York Times. Some 200 readers phoned for information, including the Korindas, who were on the tour the next year.
The OTHER SIDE OF TEXAS business had been the joint brainchild of Nancy Landau, whose reputation in the field would grow as her trips spread worldwide, and yours truly. We were returning from the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, and we conjured a route through the Hill Country and western Texas.
A travel writer paying his way on that first trip thought we should have limited it to western Texas. He had a point.
Man and beast have roamed the Chihuahuan Desert for centuries. Normally, they coexist peacefully, but after a mountain lion mauled an eight-year-old boy in the Chisos Mountains, I tracked down Doug Waid, a doctoral student conducting a study of lions in Big Bend National Park for his thesis. News accounts had said it was the first such attack recorded in the park's forty-year history.
"Well, there are a few other instances where lions interacted with people," Waid said as we sipped a beer in his desert headquarters below the mountains. "I know of one case where a lion is reported to have bitten the cuff of the trousers of a ranger at the park, and that lion was dispatched."
The encounter between boy and beast was, of course, more sobering. If the stepfather had not intervened, it could have been a fatal tragedy. Later, the attack lion was tracked and captured with aircraft and dogs. Hair found in the large intestine confirmed its offense.
Waid had done the necropsy on the lion, the equivalent of an autopsy on a human. He raised the specter that that lion was not born and raised in the park. "Looking at the pads on the feet, it did appear to me that this lion hadn't spent that much rime in rugged country," he said. "The pads ... were in excellent condition. A twenty- to twenty-four-month-old lion can't walk around this rough country and have feet that are brand new."
By comparison, the feet of a year-old male he had caught were callused and the pads flattened. He noted the worn feet of other adult lions, but said this one's pads were clean, black, and very full. Also, except for a small hole on one foot where it might have stepped on a thorn, this lion showed no callus buildup or scarring.
"I have no proof that this was not a park lion," Waid said. "Maybe this is a lion that learned how to walk on grass."
Is the theory that someone released his pet in the park more realistic? I asked. "That's a theory. It's a good theory, but that's all it stands as," he emphasized. "I would speculate that there is a good possibility that that's the case."
Why had it attacked? "I have no idea," Waid said. "It certainly wasn't hungry. It had fed on a deer. A quarter mile from the attack site, we found a white-tailed doe about eight years old. The kill ... was a real mess. This suggests to me that it was done by an inexperienced cat."
In the course of Waid's studies, a mother lion and her male cub had been captured briefly for collars to be attached. He and I had gone into the mountains earlier that afternoon to monitor by radio the different frequencies the collars transmitted. The lions, also known as cougars and panthers, normally are reclusive and stay away from humans. I wondered at our chances for seeing one.
"Well, we saw one yesterday," Waid said, as he and an assistant, Mike Davin, cut off the man-made trail. "We were real clever. We got pictures of her while she was sleeping down in a wash. We watched her for about twenty minutes. Usually, we don't get to see them. They are the same color as everything."
The radio produced a tock, tock, tock. "It sounds like their signal is coming from over the top of the hill," Waid said. "He was in here yesterday and she left. Now she has come back and is still in the same area. It suggests that they have a kill in here, or it is a very good hunting place, and they are anticipating a kill."
Tock, tock, tock. "I think we will go ahead and move up a little higher. It seems like they are both on that hill. To really get in on them we will have to go up behind that ridge and drop down."
The terrain was rocky and covered with the spiny desert plant lechuguilla as well as trees and brush. It was indeed hard to believe the cat that attacked the boy could have been in the area long.
We moved up intently.
Tock, tock, tock. "Up on the other side of this ridge," Waid said in a hushed voice. "Get on top and do a radio check down. It being a nice warm day, they may be taking advantage of the sun."
The cub's signal came strong and continuous. "It suggests he is stationary-right out in the open where the land or vegetation doesn't interfere with the signal. There's enough relief that it would be broken if he were moving." For all the intensity and suspense, however, we could not see the big cats that day.
THE PARK PRESENTS plenty of space for both lions and man to roam. Its 708,118 acres furnish a habitat for 1,000 kinds of plants, 62 of mammals (most of them nocturnal and not observed by visitors), 55 reptiles and, as mentioned earlier, 395 species of birds. About 350,000 people crowd in with the wildlife annually, although crowd in hardly applies where that figures out to two persons an acre spread over the year.
Naturalists hold interpretive programs at amphitheaters in the peak-rimmed, 5,400-foot Chisos Mountains Basin and on river lowlands of the Rio Grande. Overnight facilities include campgrounds near the theaters and Chisos Mountains Lodge, which faces spectacular changes of colors as the sun sets in the break in the peaks called the Window.
Spring arrives early with a slow succession of cacti blooms beginning in late February and lasting throughout the year. "This picture of giant dagger yuccas was taken last spring at Dagger Flat," a
volunteer naturalist said one evening during a slide show accompanied by a guitarist. "One of the flower stalks can weigh as much as 70 pounds and have as many as 1,000 flowers. And these flowers are the size of lilies."
A small health resort operated on a Rio Grande river bank here before it was parkland. Beginning in 1909, J. O. Langford welcomed guests to hot baths. The Mexican Revolution interrupted his enterprise, but he returned in 1927 to build a motel and general store. Texans and Mexicans came from as far as one hundred miles to trade and pick up mail. The springs of 105-degree mineral water were advertised as the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon failed to find. It was thought to cure rheumatism, indigestion, diabetes, alcoholism, and liver troubles. Maggy Smith ran the store after Langford sold out in 1942. She also delivered babies, lent money, and married couples. The store was closed and the output of the springs is less, but people still come to soak.
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| Rex and Bill Ivy bought Terlingua, another Big Bend haunt |
REX IVEY, sitting before a mesquite fire in his home, was telling about how he got the Lajitas Trading Post at Lajitas. He hadn't wanted the store, he said, but won it in a wax war.
As Ivey tells it, a competitor in the buying of candelilla wax tried to force him out of business by raising the price paid Mexicans who brought the wax across the border at Lajitas. The man wanted to monopolize the trade and was willing to pay the same amount as he collected for the wax in New York. This would keep Ivey from making a profit, too, since the Mexicans would sell only for the top market price. The man planned to outlast Ivey.
"It made me mad," Ivey said. "In about a week I went to Chihuahua. I leased 2,000 acres in Mexico across the river from Lajitas and put up iron gates with locks on them. Wax trucks couldn't go to Lajitas then."
The trucks had to travel upriver to Ivey property, where he bought practically all the wax. "When we weighed and paid for it, we weighed it right and paid them (the Mexican producers) right," he said. "The other fellow had been robbing them on scales, and they found that out by trading with us. They told him they thought it would be a whole lot better for his health if he didn't spend any more nights down there at Lajitas. And scared the hell out of the old fellow."
Ivey ran into his competition in Alpine and struck a deal on the street. He would buy eight sections at Lajitas and sell the other man five of them. "He signed it. I kept all the sections on the river and let him have the dry country. He didn't have one drop of water on the river."
The candililla trade was Ivey's then, after 1948, as far as Mexico was concerned. And so was the Lajitas Trading Post. "I paid one Mexican a little over $33,000 in American money," he said, noting a deal struck at Pantera in Big Bend park. "He bought a $1.98 handbag that we sold, put all the money in the bag with his .45, and went back across the river."
Ivey's son Bill, who grew up in Lajitas when it was owned by his father, was leasing the adobe store when we talked. He believed it was built about 1915. "It's kind of a childhood dream, really," Bill Ivey said. "Ever since I could reach the candy counter, I wanted to work in the store. I do enjoy it down here. It's 300 percent more work than I thought it was."
People come across the river to shop and mingle. Bill, who earned a degree in finance and economics from Texas A&M, recorded credit in an antiquated revolving file. He sold everything from nonprescription drugs to wash tubs and piñatas. "I'm using that degree," he said. "Along with the store, I found I'm not just the storekeeper. I get called on for medical services, veterinarian services, legal services. I'm postmaster half the time. You name it. I do some of it along with the banking. There's no bank. The nearest bank is Presidio."
An oddity penned outside pushed up its own beer tab. Clay Henry, a 130-pound black mountain goat, liked to guzzle longnecks. He came with the store," Bill said.
Bill leased from Walter Mischer of Houston, who has developed Lajitas as a combination small-scale resort and movie set. The little town boasted a flat, virtually treeless nine-hole golf course with thick grass greens on the river bank and a commendable desert museum with dioramas of animal life, an arboretum identifying desert plants, and historical and geological exhibits. New storefronts on a dusty main street housed a drug store, mercantile, hotel, restaurant and saloon, and accommodated the shooting of western films. Restorations included the Opry House, once a school and now an exhibition center for artists; an inexact likeness of the old church; and the Calvary Post Motel on the foundation of an Army camp.
Lajitas bustled with U.S. troops and cattle traders after the Mexican Revolution exploded in 1911. The soldiers were stationed in response to guerrilla bands on the border who raised concern in Texas when they attacked Ojinaga, Mexico-upstream from at least twenty vulnerable Big Bend ranches. Doroteo Aranga, better known as Francisco (Pancho) "Villa, received much of the blame as the bloody raids continued on small Mexican towns and extended to the ranches.
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| Left: Clay Henry, a beer guzzling mountain goat "came with the store" said Rex Ivy. Right: The Lajitas Trading Post owners learned the Post (Circa 1915) also provides the town's medical, veterinarian, legal, postal and banking services. |
"Some of the strangest and largest cattle trades in history took place on that island," she writes, "with Texas traders squatted on bootheels opposite mustachioed Mexican revolutionists or
bandits, a handkerchief spread between them, its corners weighted with rocks. Thousands of head of cattle waited on the island while the traders stacked gold coins in the handkerchief and drove the best bargains they could. The Mexicans were fighting for a cause and they were desperate for money. The Texans had the money; their position was protected by guns (the bluffs on the Texas side overlooking the river were lined with nests of machine guns and rifles); and no one doubts that they drove shrewd bargains."
It is doubtful that Gen. John J. (Blackjack) Pershing and his lieutenant, George S. Patton, were stationed at the cavalry post, as some claim, to put down Villa and his gang. The history books say Pershing chased after Villa from El Paso by way of Columbus, N.M., and penetrated deeply southward into Mexico in the Punitive Expedition of 1916. U.S. troops in the Big Bend during the revolutionary unrest did headquarter at Camp Lajitas, a subpost of Camp Marfa. The community had achieved designation as a port of entry substation and as a fourth-class post office. But with peace, it reverted to a collection of families farming irrigated plots along the river and running milk goats in the hills. By 1940 the census was 10.
It was the small population and wildlife that store boss Rex Ivey came west for in the first place, in 1929. "I've been here and on the river ever since," he said. "I liked the country because it is big and open, and then there wasn't anybody living down on the river much. It was a wide open world." He kept a doctor's appointment in Houston a half-century later, but his heart stayed in the Big Bend. "Too many goddamn idiots that will run over you, in a hurry and don't know you, and don't want to know you," he said of Houston. "Hell, I'm a country boy. And a fellow that's raised out in this big country will get run over and killed in that damn place, and why die in Houston? I'd rather be dead on a mountain than be dead in Houston."
Ivey built a rock house on a hill by the river after he moved to Lajitas. "All down there was solid beavers," he said. "You could hear them playing and jumping in that water all the time ... I came as a fur buyer. One of the things you could make a little money on was beaver."
The Iveys bought a favorite haunt of mine, the ghost town of Terlingua, in 1984. Thirteen miles east of Lajitas toward the national park, it was once a quicksilver (mercury) mining community. One may slip back to that time while watching a full moon from the porch of the 1908 mining store, or by walking through adobe ruins to the cemetery.
Howard E. Perry, a yachtsman from Chicago and later Portland, Maine, collected millions from this quicksilver mine as an absentee owner during World War I. The liquid metal was extracted from cinnabar, a red ore. It went primarily into the production of blasting caps for explosives. The mine became the second largest producer in the nation behind one in California. As many as 3,000 people lived in adobe huts next to the shafts. Adobe and rock huts sprawled in the hills around a chapel, school, dance hall, theater, a mansion for Perry's rare visits and the store.
During the mining years, Robert Cardedge, general manager, served as justice of the peace for Precinct 4 in Brewster County. When I first visited Terlingua in 1982, Sadi Jo McKinney upheld tradition and dispensed justice from the general manager's office. Her husband, Billy Pat, wore the badge of constable, and the McKinney family ran the town. "We have about the same problems they have anywhere else," Pat said, slapping at a fly with a swatter. "But we don't have as many of them. We don't have as many people." He estimated 150 residents for the area. During one of our conversations, a woman dressed in shorts and hiking boots entered with a small boy and a complaint. Neighbors' goats were eating her fruit trees.
As was the case when the mine was active, suspects in felonies, such as drug smuggling, ended up in a one-room jail to await transport to Alpine, eighty-two miles to the north. Other than felons have Stayed there. Cartledge reportedly pondered the case of a young couple who threatened to elope if he did not marry them. The prospective bride's parents pleaded with him to prevent the elopement. He took action calculated to satisfy both parties: He stopped the eloping couple and locked them together overnight in the jail.
Kenneth B. Ragsdale tells of the past in Quicksilver, Terlingua and the Chisos Mining Company and quotes one oldtimer as saying, "We had a good life. We made our fun."
Residents continued to make their fun into the '80s. Fromholtz, the Austin singer, with some help from his Terlingua friends, cooked up a little spoof of the Chili Cookoff started there and named it the Cookie Chilloff. The annual winter event featured refrigerated cookies and storytellers. Most dished out tall tales, but not Hallie Stillwell, the owner of a ranch east of the park. Her marvelous stories recounted the truth of bygone days as she remembered it.
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| Hallie Stillwell addresses the crowd at the 3rd Cookie ChillOff |
"One of my favorite stories," she said, "is about a car race that happened in Marathon in the early teens. My husband Roy had bought a Hudson Super 6, and he thought it was about the finest car going, and it was. That's the reason I married him.
"Cecil Adams, one of the other ranchers there, had bought a Buick," Stillwell said. "So they got into an argument about which car could run the fastest. They were the closest of friends, and there was no bloodshed. They decided to run a race in Marathon and picked a day. They would just make a straight beeline from the west end of town over to a factory-good straight road by the shipping pens, no stickers or brush.
"They got up early that morning. The favorite bootlegger had come to town with a supply of tequila and sotol. They had to keep this bootlegger going, so they began to imbibe on these good drinks.
And they were making bets. Gambling went on all day long.
"It was getting late in the evening. They decided they had better start the race. In the meantime, a medicine show had come to town. The medicine man set up in the road by the stock pens. Well, here came the two automobiles in the race, everybody trailing along behind. They were going so fast they didn't see the tent with all the medicine. They couldn't go around so they went through tent and all, scattering medicine and pots and pans (all items for sale).
"The old man came out. He was mad. He was raving. He said, I'm going to sue you.' My husband said. 'Just calm down, I'm the sheriff here.' And Adams said, 'And yeah, I'm the county attorney.' They said, 'Here, take a drink of this sotol. You'll feel a little bit better about this.'
"He took a drink. He said, 'I've just got to have some law here.' Ike Gerley said, 'Well, I'm the county judge here, have another drink.* That went on for quite some time.
"The racing crowd decided they would just have to fix all the stuff back. So they put the tent back, and the medicine on the shelves, and hung up the pots and pans. After a little bit, the medicine man said, 'Give me another drink of sotol. Back up and run through her again.'"
To A TEXAN, the mere idea of something called "The Art Museum of the Pecos" sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it is by no means a joke. This is serious business, conducted by serious folks.
But on this sunny afternoon in Marfa, a visit to the museum still leaves me chuckling about the riddle this place will provide anthropologists of the future. The Society of Antiquaries of London surely had the proverbial picnic at Stonehenge compared to what future excavators of this museum at the upper limits of the desert will encounter.
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| Where the Antelope Play - They're part of the art at the West Texas Museum |
Here, in a field populated by a herd of forty antelope, are clusters of concrete boxes strung out for more than half a mile in mathematical sequence from north to south. If those future anthropologists do their work well, they will discover fifteen such groupings of boxes, all made of preformed concrete, all 2.5 meters high and 5 meters wide. Each grouping is considered a piece of sculpture and contains from two to six boxes. The sculptor was Don Judd.
"Don Judd's work is principally involved with the surface qualities of objects-angles, end relationships-so these pieces change over the course of the day. The light and the shadows on them change," curator Suzan Campbell explained. "George Cisneros [the San Antonio-based composer of experimental New Music] told me he has composed music using Don's work as an inspiration because of the intervals and the rhythms and the patterns. That's one way to look at this kind of work. Look at it more musically."
Even if the anthropologists figure out that this was sculpture for an art museum, not a temple aligned for earth worship, they may still miss the fact that civilization compromised with nature here. Seventeen pieces were planned. "But there is a bump down at that end of the field," Campbell said, "and we didn't want to take the bump down."
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| Susan Campbell supervises the careful placement of the concrete boxes |
Campbell, who was showing me around the institution before its planned 1986 opening, referred to Judd as a minimalist. Since I had read Judd's commentary in Art in America magazine, in which he wrote that the label "minimal" is meaningless in all ways, I questioned the use of the word on his home base. "He doesn't like the term," Campbell said, "but he doesn't get to decide, does he, any more than Monet decides he doesn't want to be called an impressionist? What would he want to be called? An artist. But twentieth-century art, in addition to being interested in art, is interested in ideas. This century gave birth to the series of isms that we all know and hate so much. But you have to have some kind of vocabulary to talk about it, you have to have a way to categorize art historically."
Judd's most significant work, his trademark, is his boxes. They sit on the ground or floor without the pedestals of traditional sculpture. Wrote Michael Ennis in Texas Monthly magazine: "Judd always opened up the boxes by leaving off the top or sides or using Plexiglas. Instead of hiding an inert core, as a traditional bronze or marble sculpture did, the interior volume of the box became an integral part of the piece. The boxes concealed nothing. Here was the absolute culmination of modernism, an art object that represented only what it was-form, volume, color."
So there I was in a field where the antelope play discussing Minimalism with the curator of an art museum. And somehow, in the barren reaches of West Texas, Minimalism didn't seem so out of place.
Campbell explained that the museum actually houses another one hundred of Judd's aluminum boxes in two buildings elsewhere in the area. It would be marvel enough that Judd, a former New Yorker, had selected an abandoned West Texas Calvary post and a former warehouse in downtown Marfa to display art work. But he also included exhibits of three other celebrated and influential artists of the last quarter century-John Chamberlain's crushed auto-body sculptures, Dan Flavin's fluorescent light sculptures, and abstract expressionist Barnett Newman's prints.
"The frequent question I am asked is, 'Why Marfa? It's nowhere,'" Campbell said. "Well, New York City is nowhere if you live in Texas, because the hopes of most of these folks ever getting to New York City to do the galleries scene is one in a million. I don't think you should have to be lucky enough or wealthy enough to live in New York City to enjoy original art. Reproductions aren't art. I believe that in the United States we are seeing a dispersion of art throughout the country."
That notwithstanding, Marfa (pop. 2,466) represents a considerable extreme. Road miles between this town and the state's cultural centers of Houston and Dallas number about the same as those between San Francisco and Boise, Salt Lake City and Phoenix, Chicago and Little Rock, New York and Cincinnati.
"This is not a community museum in the strict sense because it is the work of internationally known artists, and the purpose of the museum is collection in depth and support facilities to allow serious scholarship," Campbell said. "We don't draw our audiences locally, necessarily, but we're not against that at all.
"I like to compare it to the McDonald Observatory up at Fort Davis [about an hour's drive away]," Campbell said. "It is a serious installation that has a rather esoteric purpose. Not a lot of people understand astrophysics. But I love to go to the observatory and listen to their talks and be amazed by the size of the telescope. I love to be there even though I don't know anything about it.
"This place, even though it is intended for serious scholarship, should offer something for everyone," she said. "We're never going to be a survey museum where we have one Picasso, and one this and that. Other museums in Texas do that very well, including Dominique de Menil's new museum in Houston. That's an amazing collection. But we have a significant collection of art, and we will have enough interpretation and education that people should be able to get something out of it."
Interestingly, this museum was being funded by the Dia Art Foundation, which is run by Heiner Friedrich of New York and his wife, Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Dominique and John de Menil.
Millennia from now, when the museum has long been a puzzle void of human care, one creature will no doubt survive: the antelope. The species has lived as a native of North America for a million years, grazing in vast numbers alongside bison at the dawn of the continent's exploration. And though their numbers have declined sharply because of overhunting, the antelopes have rebounded through conservation to acceptability as game animals. It is more accurate to call these animals pronghorns since their species, Antilocapra americana, differs from the antelope of Africa and Asia and is truly a survivor, outlasting by thousands of years other pronghorn species. It is the only species within its genus, which is the only genus within the family Antikcapridae.
Frankly, the museum's pronghorns were the first I had got much of a look at. Others roam widely in the grasslands above the desert floor around Marfa, but they are fast, the fastest animals in the nation.
Residents in the area had pointed them out to me, and they had sprinted away at speeds up to forty-five miles an hour. The young are able to outrun a man by the time they are four days old.
Curiously, prong-horns refuse - or lack the ability - to jump fences as low as three feet, which is about the height of the one confining them at the museum.
As for esoteric art on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, generally speaking there is nothing new under the West Texas sun. To the east, near Del Rio, ancient Indians painted pictographs and chipped petroglyphs into the natural rock shelters that they inhabited. Pecos River culture existed from around 8,000 years ago - near the end of the Pleistocene ice age - to 600 A.D., long before the Comanches and Apaches.
Rock art appears in some form on every continent. It preceded the development of a genuine alphabetic system of writing. The most distinctive, probably the earliest, and surely the longest continued tradition of rock painting in Texas, and perhaps in the New World, centered around the junction of the Pecos River with the Rio Grande, says W. W. Newcomb, Jr. in Rock Art of Texas Indians. Newcomb, director of the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin, viewed petroglyphs and pictographs as irreplaceable and relatively rare human documents that "reveal much about the ways of ancient men ... illustrate how a vanished, nameless people perceived of themselves and their world, their relation to God and to each other, and their fantasies and fears."
Seminole Canyon State Historical Park offers a guided walking tour of this Indian art in the Fate Bell Shelter. The rock depictions include many shamans - priests or medicine men - whose followers believed they alone could influence good and evil spirits. Another painting, this one only accessible by water and under a rock overhang near the mouth of Seminole Canyon, gives prominence to a cougar.
The atlatl, a weapon used before the bow and arrow, is frequently depicted on the walls. The weapon consisted of a dart and a two foot stick for throwing the dart. Upon impact, the main dart shaft
would fall away from the hardwood foreshaft and stone point, leaving the victim unable to pull the dart out.
The artwork at Seminole Canyon is colorful, with red dominating. It shows up in 51 percent of the murals, black in 25 percent, according to the pioneer work of the archaeologist A.T. Jackson, Picture-Writing of 'Texas Indians. Orange, yellow, white, and green complete the color range. Minerals most often supplied the paints. Red came from hematite or ocher, and sometimes cinnabar; black from a manganese compound; white from kaolin, gypsum, or barite; yellow from ocher or limonite; and green from copper oxide.
I also took a boat up seventy-eight-mile-long Lake Amistad to visit other sites. Amistad, a beautiful international reservoir often swept by high winds, engulfs the confluences of the Pecos and Devils rivers with the Rio Grande. Jackson notes that a quarter of the state's pictographs appear in Val Verde County, site of Lake Amistad.
Forrest Kirkland, an artist whose copies of rock paintings appear with Newcomb's text, says the effort involved in the Indians' painting of the murals "is proof enough of their serious purpose."
The pictures in almost every cave in Val Verde County extend far above the reach of a man standing on the floor, he notes, so a ladder of some kind must have been required. In a few cases they were
painted flat on a ceiling more than ten feet high, requiring the use of what we would call scaffolding. Grinding, mixing, and applying the paint took considerable labor since certain figures are nine or more feet tall, solid color on rough surfaces, and finished in three shades.
The shamans "are the focal points of virtually all paintings, dominate most by their size, and frequently overwhelm the viewer by sheer numbers," Newcomb says. He favors the hypothesis that they were part of an early mescal bean cult. The mountain laurel, a beautiful purple-flowering shrub, bears the mescal beans, which are hard red seeds with a narcotic property. Archeologists have not only found the seeds in eight digs, Newcomb says, but mescal cults of more recent Indian tribes also engage in practices characteristic of the pictographs. He theorizes that shamans took the beans during dances to induce visionary experiences, which they later described to onlookers. Newcomb says animals, dances with weapons, pelts, feathers, rattles, and other items important to medicine men in a modern mescal-bean fraternity have their representation in Pecos River pictographs. "It is difficult not to interpret almost every element in the pictographs in these terms," the museum director says. Thus, the red dots associated with shamans in pictographs become mescal beans.
His hypothesis may well explain the fact that many pictographs have been painted over earlier pictographs. Shamans apparently held their rituals where previous supernatural communication of earlier significance occurred, Newcomb feels, and would overlay with their own the earlier illustrations of experiences and gained powers.
The edge of the Chihuahuan Desert may be far from the minds of cultured Texans, but it is home to art--and has been for millennia.
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